PICASSO 1906: The Great Transformation

The Reina Sofía Museum is presenting an exhibition from 15 November to 4 March 2024 in the Sabatini Building (Floor 2) that seeks to investigate the artist's contribution to the birth of Modern Art from today's perspective, through more than 120 works. The exhibition is part of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 initiative to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish artist's death.

The exhibition, curated by Eugenio Carmona, shows a Picasso full of optimism and eager to redefine the artistic experience. Committed to the process and in search of the primitive, his work focuses on two concerns: the body and interculturality. Through drawings and sketchbooks, full synergy with primitive cultures and a search for the primitive can be observed.

The exhibition, which brings together more than 120 works from private collections and leading national and international institutions, aims to renew important criteria on the key role played by the artist in the creation of "Modern Art". 

1906 was a year of great transformation for Picasso. To date, Picasso's production in 1906 has been understood as an epilogue to the Rose Period or as a prologue to The Young Ladies of Avignon. But it can now be said that 1906 was a "period" in its own right in Picasso's creative future.

During this period the painter from Malaga underwent a major change in his style and technique, embracing Cubism and moving away from the realism that had characterised his previous work. Picasso approached the representation of Arcadian adolescence as a symbol of a new beginning in which the painted body accepts its own emancipation. 

The artist was able to create generic physiognomies and bring them to the quality of a synthetic ideogram. He redefined the interweaving of background and figure, a new sense of mimesis, developing material and tactile concepts in the modelling of sculpture. His accelerated pace of transformations culminated in the first two months of 1907 and, in all his overflowing activity, the dialogue with Gertrude Stein was crucial for him. In his search for the primordial, the artist proposed a full synergy with the artistic productions of cultures that were previously considered "primitive". 

Image Credits:

• Pablo Picasso, Nude with Joined Hands, 1906. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The William S. Paley Collection, 1990 © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2023 © 2023, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence
• Pablo Picasso. Self-Portrait, c. 1906. Oil on Canvas. 65 x 54 cm. Picasso-Paris National Museum. Dation Pablo Picasso, 1979. © Succesion Picasso. Photographic Credit: Mathieu Rabeau/Etablissement public de la Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées
• Pablo Picasso. Bust of a Young Woman, 1906. Oil on Canvas. 54 x 42 cm. Reina Sofia National Art Centre Museum
• Pablo Picasso. The Two Brothers, 1906. Gouache on cardboard. 80 x 59 cm. Picasso-Paris National Museum